Adobe shows off new prototype tools and features at Sneaks event

Every year at its Adobe Max and Adobe Summit conferences, the company's R&D teams show off new features and apps that it's working on. Adobe makes a big deal of these being prototypes, which may or may not become real features in apps such as Photoshop - or brand new tools - but over the last few years about 50% of things shown at Sneaks are in apps you can download from Creative Cloud (such as Photoshop's Content-Aware Fill tool).

At this year's Adobe Max in San Diego, Adobe's Sneaks were presented by the company's Kim Chambers and Comedy Central comedian Jordan Peele.

StyLit

This app was described by presenter Jordan Peele as a quick way to make A-ha's Take on Me video.

It's an app that applies styles from things drawn (or formed) on real sheets of paper (or in Photoshop) to 3D model. An Adobe engineer drew a textured ball on a piece of paper, and the lighting and texture were transferred to a 3D models of a dinosaur, hand and man.

He also demoed it using real clay instead of a drawing, or particular shading styles such as cross-hatching and stipple.

For a final flourish, he showed it working with animation.

If you want to give StyLit a try, you can download it from stylit.org.

Syncmaster

Syncmaster is a new algorithm that finds the most 'interesting parts' of an audio track - whether dialog or music - and gives you markers to sync video clips.

Colour Chamelon

This recolours images to match them to each other, or to an external colour scheme.

Adobe demoed it with the example of a brochure with a set colour scheme, filled with photos with an inconsistant tonal range. A single click changed these colours to make them consistent.

Looking at the process, the Adobe engineer showed how certain colours were matched to each other - and adjusted the mapping to make it more visually pleasing.

LoopWelder

This technology creates seamless loops from short videos.

The demo showed a clip of a record playing, which when looped you could see the needle jump back as one clip ended and the next version of it started. When LoopWelder was applied, the 'glitch' disappeared seamlessly.

Also, the engineer showed it inside Premiere Pro to make a clip longer.

Concept Canvas

This add-on for Photoshop lets you use a sketch to search - and it could be useful in tools like Illustrator, InDesign or Adobe XD too

You draw areas on a document and call the layers the search terms that you want. The tech searches in Adobe Stock and you get results that match the layout and the terms - for example a man next to a dog as shown here.

Interactive Vectorisation

This tool for Illustrator combines that application 's Image Trace feature and the vectorisation engine in the Adobe Capture app for better creation of vector objects based on photos.

It included global threshold and transparency settings with a brush to fine tune the results.

Wetbrush

Previously demoed at the Siggraph animation conference in August, this digital painting system uses your graphics chip to do more complex modelling of how paint, brush bristles, canvas and lighting work together - for much more realistic oil paintings.

It was created in collaboration with Nvidia.

Adobe also showed a 3D-printed painting of Jordan Keele created in Wetbrush.

Quick Layout

This adjusts the layout of pages in Illustrator (or perhaps InDesign or XD) as you add more images - as the other content resizes and adjusts to fit.

You can also adjust elements, with others automatically resizing to fill gaps.

Sky Is Not The Limit

This replaces the sky in an photo with a better one from another image. This is entirely automatic, using tech based on machine learning.

It also works with rainbows.

VoCo

This lets you 'Photoshop' vocal tracks in Audition to rearrange speech. It transcribes audio, which you can then cut, copy and paste into a different order.

You can also add words that weren't in the original dialog, based on the vocal characteristics of the speaker. To do this it needs about 20 minutes of speech, and Adobe says its working on tools to identify when this has been applied to prevent it being used in damaging ways.

Project Clover

This is tool for editing VR video in VR. Using an HTC Vive to view and control the app, you can look around video clips and make cuts between them. A timeline and buttons below give you controls.